The Comeback Kid

We take a closer look at Nivada Grenchen's glorious past, and CEO Guillaume Laidet shares what it takes to resurrect a watchmaking icon

- by Somya Rauthan

Established in 1926 in the small town of Grenchen, Switzerland, by Otto Wüllimann, Hermann Schindler, and Jakob Schneider, Nivada Grenchen has spent nearly a century crafting timepieces that blend precision and functionality.

Since its inception, the brand was quick to build a reputation for creating automatic, robust tool watches featuring significant water resistance and high-precision chronographs.

In the beginning, it was dress watches from the brand that gained popularity, and by 1939, the brand had joined hands with the New York-based Croton Watch Company to distribute its watches in the US, under the labels Croton, Croton Nivada, and Croton Nivada Grenchen. Over the decades, plenty of its watches became iconoclasts. The 1954 Antarctic was the first watch that went to Antarctica—members of the American Navy’s Deep Freeze 1 expedition, an international scientific collaboration for geological, meteorological, and glaciological research, wore it to the South Pole between 1955 and 1956. Tested for its durability in extreme conditions, the watch proved to be a reliable companion in one of the harshest environments. The steel watch featured dauphine hands, Arabic markers at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock, and had a water resistance of about 50 metres.